Lost on the Moon
Peter Porter brings home to earth the life work of John Ashbery, winner of the 2008 Griffin Prize for his selected later poems Notes from the Air
Towards the end of that sprawling humanist cavalcade, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, one of the more significant dramatis personae, Astolfo, a sanguinary paladin, is carried off to the moon by an enchantment (which in Ariosto usually means some neurasthenic madness derived from love). His chief discovery there is that the surface of the moon abounds in objects which people on earth have lost. There is a sub-Christian notion in this – not too long before Ariosto, and nearby his home town Ferrara, Italy’s second great modern saint, Anthony of Padua, lived out his ministry. To this day the pious and the hopeful pray to Anthony to find them things they’ve lost. In Ariosto, it is, of course, not so much chairs and tables or bequests which they have been deprived of as emotions: love, friendship, reciprocal admiration etc. But Ariosto, ever the dry and practical poet, emphasizes that the moon is a repository, junkyard even, of humanity’s misplaced possessions. The problem is how to get these things back to the earth where we can rejoice once more in their possession.
I find John Ashbery’s poetry can be, if not fully understood, then at least appreciated if I think of it as made of verbal structures derived from everyday life on earth but magically manoeuvred to a newly created life on the moon. One of Ashbery’s most acute critics Stephen Burt, in a recent TLS article, emphasizes that no contemporary poet deals more unflinchingly with existence as we know it in the busy huddle of urban living. More even than Auden, Ashbery is unafraid of common figures of speech, proverbial utterances and even the stalest clichés of daily communication. A reader need not know what got into the newspapers during the life of Wallace Stevens to feel at ease reading his verse. Ashbery, however is with us at the check-out, on holiday, watching TV, dousing ourselves in Hollywood fragrances, listening to our doctors and even thinking about the way modern man dies. He also knows British and wider European Literature, and dovetails it in an unforced way into his poetry. He is not a spurner of any kind of elitism; he just knows that words are kinned outside their specialisms and genres. His titles are not as highbrowly teasing as Stevens’s, but they tweak the broadcast pieties of academic English. Daffy Duck can go to Hollywood but so can Andrew Marvell’s Tom May be put drunk into the Packet Boat. Though Ashbery is a difficult poet, claimed by his followers as the true inheritor of Modernism, I am convinced that his poetry, highly recognizable in its lineaments, is something more original than run-of-the-mill American experiment – namely Moon Poetry. We find the things we love in it, but we cannot always recognize where they come from, or what they are doing, or bring them home to earth to live with us.
Another metaphor for the Ashbery method, or more properly the Ashbery ambience, comes from conjuring up the extraordinary detailed tapestries of the late medieval period, such as those in the Musée de Cluny. In the ‘Lady and the Unicorn’ series, the background is often what is known as ‘milles fleures’, an amazing carpet of individual blooms related to each other but serving a greater purpose, a sort of Field of the Cloth of Life. With Ashbery it is the case of ‘milles contes’; dozens of stories, mostly cut off in the telling, are gathered together in any one poem, in defiance of plot and objective reason. Such writing amounts to a pleasing bewilderment of dramas, an untheological pandemonium, as anecdotes converse with one another, relying on the poet’s verbal skills to keep the traffic flowing. One result of this has been his much remarked reliance on non sequitur. While his more intransigent admirers think this is a good thing, others of us believe it doesn’t work quite like that.
His best poems can be gems with many faces, yet are always of consistent substance. ‘These Lacustrine Cities’, ‘Grand Galop’, ‘Saying It to Keep It from Happening’, ‘And Ut Pictura Poesis is Her Name’, ‘Syringa’ and the stateliest of his long poems, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, are all flashing different lights at the same time. When this happens within a dramatic monologue, a kind of radiant if sometimes protracted Browningesque conviction unfolds. Often his sense of Victorian responsibility – allied to a fondness for detail derived from Victorian Literature (chiefly English, not American) – makes his poems much easier for the reader to enter than those of many of his contemporaries. It is many years since a major poet’s tone has been more important than his moral concerns or his aesthetic. Ultimately, we don’t need interpreters while on his moonscape. We have a pentecostal willingness to understand, or at least to be entertained.
But such prodigality can become insufferable at very great length. You might be able to dredge fascinating local insights at any moment from such extended poems as the antiphonal ‘Litany’, ‘A Wave’, ‘The System’, ‘And the Stars Were Shining’ or book-length works such as the almost interminable Flow Chart and that teasing burlesque, Girls on the Run; but more frequently you will be deafened by the noise of the poems’ sound-floor. Success with the public and the critics has encouraged Ashbery not only to write at greater length but to prefer a garrulous free association to more poetic songlines and to print the result frequently as prose. For such an instinctive formalist, he has shown little interest in developing strict stanza-shapes and divisions; his quatrains have ragged lines and seldom rhyme. In this he departs from the example of Wallace Stevens and Auden, his two father figures if not necessarily models. Stevens rhymes only intermittently, but is much more regular in metre, happy to indulge in pavanes and threnodies. While Ashbery has been fond of pantouns, sonnets of various sorts, and occasionally of villanelles and sestinas, his preferred way of dealing with the richness of the past is to dissolve our poetic inheritance into an essence, so the reader feels the gamey disquiet of Beddoes (or even The Golden Treasury) as a ghostly presence in poems of a deliberately dandified novelty. There is one constant. We are in the self-governing realm of language. Words rule; form follows.
While writing this short and impertinent assessment, I have returned to (or sometimes encountered for the first time) almost all of Ashbery’s copious poetic output. As music critics like to assert, there is a recognizable line running through his oeuvre. Late Ashbery is more deliquescent than his early and formative work – it sometimes amounts to violent electrical interference to poems you imagine were more straightforward imagined ab ovo. But there is never a complete loss of direction or abandonment of a binding force field. Reading his most recent collection, A Worldly Country, for last year’s T S Eliot prize, I was struck by a couple of instances of poems which could well have been included in Some Trees or The Tennis Court Oath.
The finest of Ashbery’s achievements to my taste remain in three middle period volumes – Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Houseboat Days and Shadow Train. The title poem of the first of these is as commanding and transfiguring in its way as Stevens’s ‘Esthétique Du Mal’ or ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’, but with an additional and unexpected authority gained by lacking Stevens’s omnipresent smoothness. It’s almost like early Pisan sculpture in its roughness – Nicola and Giovanni Pisano versus Jacopo della Quercia and Donatello. Ashbery here becomes the heir to such extended analyses of human endeavour and artistic wilfulness as Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ and ‘Mr. Sludge the Medium’. Taking Parmigianino’s self-distortion in his mirror as starting-point, Ashbery moves into the hinterland of identity, and finds both the inwardness of speculation and the outwardness of the soul’s passage through existence. He points out that Latin for mirror is ‘speculum’ – at any moment you may find that what you see is not what you have been seeing or what you have anticipated would be shown. My sense of Pisan roughness comes from the poem’s eschewing any lyrical surface – the lyricism stays in the notions and in the ever-spreading associations. It is a curiously old-fashioned way of composing poetry`: you put more in; you extend and develop; you remain conjecturing to the end. The whole lengthy discourse is a kind of ‘exploded’ philosophy. It may be the best way to embody Whitman’s self-congratulatory admission that he contradicted himself:
The momentum of a conviction that had been building
Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it
Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains
The white precipitate of its dream
In the climate of sighs flung across our world,
A cloth over a birdcage.
In a later poem Ashbery asks ‘Who knows how much there can be / of any one thing if another stops existing?’ His answer to such a question is usually ‘probably nothing’. As Stephen Burt writes, ‘no poet has written our inevitable deaths into such daily, here-and-now poetry, or done so with so equable a demeanour’. Ashbery’s Orpheus poem ‘Syringa’ ends with an acceptance of death’s democratic principles – let the great artists protest as they may.
Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. “But what about
So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.
I find this level-headed reticence more reassuring than Rilke’s acrobatic transcendence. Perhaps it’s a good thing to live longer.
Despite the remarkable consistency of style running through all Ashbery’s work, there is a perceptible difference of tone in his shorter poems, especially when he groups them in sequences, as he often does. His fondness for aphorisms worked together, plus a winning terseness of effect, makes the sequence in Shadow Train very attractive. Its bizarria reinforces the unswervability of human fate, but does so with a light touch. In ‘Qualm’ Ashbery writes ‘The agony is permanent / Rather than eternal’. This is worthy of Lichtenberg and derives, as his aphorisms do, from what another poet called ‘real, visible, material happiness’. Sometimes it seems a discounting of the elaborate flourishes elsewhere in Ashbery’s poetry. By now, we, his readers, should have discovered that we do not have to be always on the moon to appreciate what he is telling us.
Page(s) 30-31
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